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System, Hold the Math
Just to illustrate something, here are a pair of systems that you can use as a basis for resolution. They share two key characteristics – neither is math dependent but both are heavily expectations dependent. Math is, I hope, self explanatory, but expectations are another matter. What that means is that they depend on the […]
More Skills
So many good comments on the last post that I really can’t process them, except to note that they resulted in my digesting them, and lead to this. Ok, let’s start from a premise: If you roll the dice, you’ll succeed. The idea behind this is pretty simple – if your character is one who […]
The Fragile Foundation of Skills
This is a rant. I’m circling an idea, and if you read this, you get to watch. There’s a truism that gets rolled out from time to time when talking about old school D&D vs newer iterations (and more generally, old vs new games) and that is this: “No one fell off a horse before […]
Moving Pieces
This started out as another 13th Age post, but I ended up tabling it as a bigger issue came up in discussion which, I think, crystallized a few thoughts about games, how they’re run and how they’re played. Now, here’s the caveat up front: I’m speaking in broad generalizations here, not making assertions about anyone’s […]
Iconic Examples
So, here are a few specific tricks you might want to consider to build an interesting Icon set: The Icon DeckOne interesting thing about the existing 13 Icons is that they’re not hard to map to half of the greater arcana of the Tarot deck. Some of that is probably intentional, but it’s also almost […]
Icons and Anchors
So, one fun thing to do with the Icons system from 13th Age is to start mapping it onto fiction and game settings you like. I’ve done it several times, and I encounter an interesting pattern – the first few Icons of any setting tend to be very easy to come up with, but somewhere […]
Personal Icons
Ok, so now that you’ve got the idea of icons, what can you do? First and foremost, you can use them. The 13 in the rules are rock solid, and the text provides lots of interesting guidelines on customizing them. As is the nature of iconic characters, you have a lot of leeway around the […]
Icons and d20Tech
So, please take it as a given that 13th Age is going to be a great game. It’s got some great minds behind it, and it really feels like it takes d20, combines a few of the good lessons from 4e, and makes a “good parts version” of d20. The last d20 game that made […]
The Storyteller’s Tools
One essential part of storytelling is that the teller knows the story. This seems self evident, but it’s worth calling out because of what it means to the process – because the tell knows what’s going to happen, she knows *how* to tell the story. She knwo when to lower her voice, when to pause […]